SIDE STREETS: Ukrainian Catholic Church quietly celebrating a century of faith

Saturday

Apr 19, 2014 at 11:56 PMApr 20, 2014 at 12:27 AM

St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church is a jewel of a church, built in 1914. The year 2014 will be this small church's 100th anniversary.

Marc Munroe Dion Herald News Staff Reporter

FALL RIVER — The rain is slashing down all over the city. Globe Four Corners drowns under a foot or so of murky, brown water.

Sunday morning, 7:30.

Up the wide red brick steps and into the church, water streaming from my jacket.

Glory.

St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church glows with gold, gentle-eyed icons of the saints under a barrel vault. Wooden pews polished by generations of backsides.

It’s a jewel of a church, as glowing and beautiful as pysanky, the colorful Easter eggs hand-dyed by Ukrainian people.

There were never many Ukrainians in Fall River. Unlike the Irish, the French or the Portuguese, they did not remake the city in their own image.

St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church was built in 1914. In 1916, it had 199 members.

“We have about five active families,” the Rev. Msgr. Roman Golemba tells me, sitting in his black clothes in the basement of the church. He is priest here and at St. Michael the Archangel in Woonsocket, R.I.

“We have a lot of members who are in nursing homes and housebound,” Golemba says. “I visit them once a month.”

Golemba will say Mass for a congregation of one this morning.

“The number doesn’t really matter, does it?” I ask him.

“No. It doesn’t,” he says.

The Ukrainians, like everyone else in Fall River, worked the mills. Like the Polish, they clustered in the South End.

Like the Polish, the Ukrainians knew oppression in the Old Country, with Russia forever growling on their doorstep, engulfing them from time to time. They knew the value of America, where individual religious bigotry was rife but the government did not much concern itself with where you went to church. The mill owners, by and large, could not distinguish between one group of incomprehensible, superstitious foreigners and another.

“Stalin liquidated the church in 1946,” Golemba says, giving some of church’s history in the Old Country. “They sent the priests to Siberia.

“In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union, the church rose up and we could worship in public,” he says.

Russia is growling on Ukraine’s doorstep again and, in Fall River, Golemba says that this small, white church survives because longtime parishioner Olga Hoffman left the church $545,000.

“We get the interest from that,” Golemba says.

Golemba explains that a careful examination of the dome atop the church steeple lets you know this is a Ukrainian church.

“The Russian Orthodox are onion domes,” he says. “Ours are pears.”

Upstairs, the church’s altar is behind the icon screen, a latticework screen with three doors, each one adorned with the kind of “crystal” doorknobs my memere had in her house.

Icons, paintings of saints, are everywhere, many of them showing the saint with one hand raised, as if to bless or instruct. Icons are readable, like books.

“If you see an icon, you will always see that any landscape in it is much smaller than the human figures,” Golemba says. “This is to show that man is the greatest of God’s creations.”

The year 2014 will be this small church’s 100th anniversary.

“As far as the jubilee, we have only five families so we will not invite the bishop,” Golemba says. “It would be embarrassing. We will have a quiet celebration.

“Boston gets the new Ukrainian immigrants,” Golemba says. “Here, there is no industry, no jobs to bring people.”

He disappears to robe himself for the Mass. I go upstairs and take a pew, which creaks a little under my weight.

The icons are watching, bearded faces of the saints, painted in one dimension, haloed, clutching a quill pen, writing the gospels.

The names here were Ivancin, Kostiuk, Kotesky, Lapka, Bilinsky.

The church prospered, owning the former Ukrainian Home until 1960. There was a rectory and grounds on Eagleville Road in Tiverton, where picnics were held.

Steven Olancin and Michael Lapka, sons of the parish, died in World War II.

“A lot of the time there are three or four others,” says Helen Love, who is today’s congregation. “In this kind of weather, I don’t think anyone will want to come.”

It’s a little chilly in the church. There’s a little water in the basement. Dull, stormy daylight comes through the windows, each one featuring a large, stained glass cross.

Every Sunday since 1914. In this building. And numbers don’t matter.

Marc Munroe Dion’s “Side Streets” column draws on his knowledge of the area and his affection for the city where he was born. It’s about people and places and history and the voice that comes only from one corner of southeastern Massachusetts.

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